“Obviously,” I say quietly.
“I don’t know how fast the rumors are going to spread—but it can’t take long. And when word gets out that Daniel’s not who he says he is, the mistrust and chaos will destroy the entire Curatoria faster than any virus could. And then there will be nothing and no one to stand up to the Reduciates.” She rises to her feet, a medical kit she never even opened clasped in her hand.
She turns to go, but just before she’s out of arm’s length I reach out and grab the corner of her scrub shirt. “Audra?” I glance both ways, but the hallway is still empty. “What am I supposed to do?”
She purses her lips and tilts her head toward me.
“Hurry.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Audra told me to hurry, and that’s what I’m going to do. But not directly back to the lab.
I check the huge clock on the atrium wall. I don’t have much time before Daniel expects me to return.
Ten minutes.
I practically run up the stairs and then down the hallway to the room I shared with Logan. I need privacy, but my Michigan bedroom is gone, and I can’t risk arousing suspicion by transforming another space. Reaching the room, I close the door on the rest of the Curatoriates and glance around the apartment, curious if Logan has changed anything.
He hasn’t.
The room is still a perfect replica of when Quinn and Rebecca were together. I feel a sinking in my stomach. Benson was right. Logan wants me to be who I used to be. Who I would be if I hadn’t sustained so much brain damage.
But that’s not who I am now.
I sit on the bed and wedge myself into a corner so I’m stable. In my hand is the plastic bag containing Sonya’s braid. I know I agreed with Thomas a few hours ago when he said now is not the time—but something, something about Audra’s revelation about Daniel’s diligo is pushing me forward. Before I go back up to that lab, I need to know what Sonya knew.
I’m not sure what’s going to happen, but considering how bad it was last time, I need to be prepared for anything. I don’t open the plastic bag right away. I stare at the simple white twist of twine. This is the object that will bring back the memories of a woman desperate enough to kill herself to protect a secret. A secret I have to know now. Though logically I know suicide isn’t the same for Earthbounds as it is for humans, I still get a cramp in my stomach thinking about it.
Do I want to know this desperate person who was once me? Do I want her secrets? Or are some things better left buried?
The next time I resurge, in my next life, I won’t have a choice—Audra said all of my future awakenings should be normal, with the exception of my memories of this life.
In this moment, I can choose. But I can’t forget as easily as I can remember. I nervously rub the braid with my thumb through the plastic.
I think the doctors may be right—that even my memories of other lives are actually Rebecca’s memories. And since Rebecca couldn’t have known anything about Sonya, I’ll never know the entire story unless I do one more memory pull. I have to take the chance.
I slowly pull open the ziplock bag with clicks that shatter the silence of the bedroom, and a fear like icy water makes me shiver. It’s going to hurt. It’s going to deplete my energy. I know that. But the work in the lab is done—the part that requires Transforming, anyway.
And my need to know Sonya’s secret is so much greater after Audra’s revelation. Hesitation seizes me as I reach for the cream-colored twist, but I push it away, determined to discover everything.
As my fingertips make contact, colors swirl in front of my face. The same piercing headache I remember from touching the necklace surges into my skull, filling my head with agony. I clamp my mouth shut over whimpers that fight to escape my throat. Still, it’s not quite as bad as before, and I manage to remain very slightly aware of my physical body.
The warm feeling of broth being poured into my skull makes me recall the memory of the little English urchin that Marianna triggered in Portsmouth. That trace of familiarity helps calm me and wars with the jagged edges of my fears. Slowly the storm begins to calm as I spread a net around Sonya’s life, rein it in and let it seep into my brain. Into my life.
Then the pictures are flying past—the exhilarating but manic montage that I know will take days to sort through. I try to pay attention, but the images are so fast, so blurry, and the deluge of them makes my breathing go faster and faster until my head feels like it’s going to float away.
And then everything goes black.
I’m not sure how long I slump on the floor passed out, but eventually my eyes flutter open. With no windows I don’t know if it’s the middle of the night or early morning.
But I’m not tired.
I remember.
Pretty clearly, in fact.
My memories of being Sonya feel so much crisper than my memories of being Rebecca. I’m surprised at first, but then I remember Audra telling me to look at the big picture when I thought about “short-term memory.” Of course I would remember Sonya’s life more clearly; it happened so much more recently.
Most clearly, I remember those last moments, just like in my dreams. The third one was my true death; I turned my own heart to stone. My brain really was trying to tell me things I couldn’t retrieve on my own.
I can see the faces of the people surrounding me in stark detail now. Marie’s face. Marianna’s. So determined to hide her secret.
The secret I saw as a tiny urchin on an icy night in England, one life before I became Rebecca. When I watched Marianna meet with her partner in secret.
Her partner with his short beard and kind face.
The one that has no beard now.
The one that’s waiting for me up in the lab.
Daniel.
THIRTY-EIGHT
I walk down the corridor as though traveling on a moving walkway going the wrong direction. It feels like it takes too long, and yet I arrive at the base of the stairs in scarcely more than a thought. My legs feel too weak to carry me, but I lift them one at a time and climb.
One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. My mental cadence from my old physical therapist comes back to me even though my leg is now healed. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.
I feel entirely alone. There’s no one I can go to. Logan is off trying to get into the vault, Thomas and Alanna have to stay out of sight for the sake of the entire human population, and Benson . . .
I can’t go to Benson.
Even if I had time, I don’t dare put him at risk. Not now when I’m so close to being able to get him out of here. Alive.
It’s just me now. And Sonya.
Audra’s story is spinning in my head, swirling around with my newly restored memories like a merry-go-round going just fast enough to scare you but not fast enough to throw you off.
And I want off.
But not yet. One more step. The next time I walk out of this lab, it’s going to be the last time, I swear to myself. Then I’m going to leave. And I’m never coming back. I try not to think farther than that.
To consider that nowhere in the world is truly safe. That despite its incredible facade, the Curatoria was never safe. Not for anyone. It was simply a way to play both sides. To hold all the cards. All the resources.
All the power.
Thomas is right. Daniel will never let me go. We’re going to have to break out. Escape. Somehow. I’m not convinced I can do it. But I owe it to the world to try.
Daniel and Marianna. Marianna and Daniel. The greatest scam in the history of the world. Splitting up to concurrently run the two supposedly warring brotherhoods of supernatural beings. It’s the secret I saw on the night I was killed by Marianna as a little girl in England. The secret Rebecca was drowned for protecting. Protecting until she could get enough support to do something about it.
&nb
sp; Do I have that yet? After this morning, I don’t think I do.
And even if I did, I’m still missing a piece. One final piece to this puzzle. I still don’t know what made me the way I am.
The elusive Greta didn’t come back with Sonya’s memories. Fleeting impressions, an acute sense of fear, but no information. I might be able to mine it out of my brain in the future—the way I keep getting new memories of Rebecca—but it’s not going to happen before my feet reach the lab.
The truth is, I may never know. Not really. Not unless Logan can manage to get Greta’s artifact. Assuming, of course, that the Greta Alanna found and the Greta Sonya mentioned are, in fact, the same person. Surrounded by so many lies, even if someone told me, would I recognize the truth?
I go through the mockery of the detoxification process—the hand washing, the chemical spray-down between the air-locked doors. Surely Daniel knows I’m immune. He’s playing both sides. But now would be the worst time for Daniel to find out that I know. I need to catch him unawares.
I look beyond the double-paned glass to see that our samples are out of their room-temperature bath and waiting for the final step. This is where we really test my abilities. Can I truly just create something that has been altered on a level even tinier than cellular . . . and have it work?
The thought scares me as much as it fills me with wonder.
Assuming it works, that’s what I’ll spend the next several months doing. Making more. Millions and millions of doses for everyone who has survived Daniel and Mariana’s terrible plot. And when the world has all the vaccine it needs, I’ll disappear like Thomas and Alanna.
I can’t wait.
When Daniel sees me, his eyes light up and he rubs his hands together excitedly, like we’re about to have a hearty meal. As though this morning never happened.
It makes me sick.
Everything he does makes me sick.
“I almost started without you, but I decided you deserve to see the results for yourself.”
I nod wordlessly. As though I agree.
“Ready?”
We each take half of the Petri dishes holding vaccinated samples mixed with every mutation of the disease Daniel’s team was able to find.
My new vaccine has to repel all of them, or it’ll be useless—just a tiny bump on the road for this fast-mutating sickness.
We have forty samples to test. I begin bringing them over to our worktable.
“Where are the lab techs?” I ask. Normally they would have done the menial work like this for us. Had the samples ready and waiting.
“I told them to stay away,” Daniel says, and his whole body seems tense. “It’s not that I think this is going to fail—I don’t, I have great confidence that this is it—but if it does, I can’t have it getting out.” He smiles tightly at me. “Just the two of us.”
I don’t argue, but it does seem odd—and I make a note and store it away in my head.
Two hours later my chest is tight and I’m having trouble focusing on the final couple of slides. Every single one has been effective so far. Daniel’s hands are trembling visibly as he clips in his last slide.
We’ve hardly spoken this entire time. Just one word. “Positive. Positive. Positive.” The word that means the vaccine is working. That it’s repelling the virus.
I rub my eyes before peering into the microscope again. Despite the excitement, my body is tired. From hunching, from that clenching of all my muscles just before I’m sure of what I’m seeing, from holding and releasing my breath.
From not exploding with all the secrets inside me. I glance at the clock. It’s only a few minutes until Daniel’s countdown technically ends. But how accurately can you estimate the time of somebody’s death?
It could happen early. The thought makes me shiver, and I force myself to focus on my slide. I’ve got to finish and get the hell out of here.
“Positive,” I whisper, then reach for the last slide.
Daniel sits up straight and runs his gloved fingers through his hair. “Positive,” he echoes. I turn to my final slide.
Last one.
I peer into the lighted field, focusing, zooming in, looking for the markers. Check one, two, three, and four.
Four signs.
All positive.
I lean back. I’m done.
Yes, this vaccine is literally going to save billions of people, but what I’m truly thankful for at this precise moment is that I don’t have to work in this lab—with Daniel—ever again.
“Tavia?” I look over at him and see, for the first time ever, raw fear in his eyes. I don’t understand for a second until he says, “Well?”
Oh. I didn’t say it. I let a fraction of the relief I feel show in a tiny smile that barely curves the edges of my mouth. “Positive.”
A sound that’s half whoop, half sob comes out of Daniel’s mouth, and he strips off his gloves. I start to reprimand him, but realize that all of the diseased samples have been neutralized; it doesn’t really matter. “Hurry, hurry, fill the trays!” he says. “Enough for everyone here—we’ll get it right over to the medical wing.” I stand, but my legs falter beneath me.
I didn’t actually eat during my break.
I’m so weak already. But I don’t want to stay in this lab one second longer than I must. I can last—I have to. I create some orange juice inside my mouth and swallow it down. I’ve got to get through this.
We stand in front of the trays upon trays of empty tube holders. For our tests I only made one tray’s worth, but I generated the whole thing with one swish of my hands. My abilities are so powerful that even now it’s hard to comprehend.
I close my eyes and picture the isolated protein transformed within the active viral vaccine that Daniel’s team made. I draw my inner camera back and picture the drops of murky fluid, then tubes full of the liquid, then trays full of the tubes. I open my eyes, take a breath, grit my teeth, and wave my arm over the table.
With the quietest of clatters, the trays are full.
Thousands of doses of vaccine against the virus that’s ravaging the world. That’s killing Earthbounds so violently the world is being destroyed with them.
The earth’s salvation. There in hundreds of tiny tubes.
I did that.
I take an unsteady step backward, not from weariness but the sheer enormity of what I’ve just done.
“So . . . so that’s it? There? Just like last time?”
I nod, staring.
A grin spreads slowly across Daniel’s face. “At last,” he whispers. “At last.” He turns to me, his arms outstretched.
I do not want to hug him, but he doesn’t give me time to protest. He draws me to him, pounding my back with his hand. I’m just lifting my arms to push him away when fire thrusts into my stomach and everything in my body clenches around the stabbing pain of a knife, jammed into my abdomen.
I yank back, my wide eyes staring at Daniel, but his hand whips up and grabs my face, squeezing my jaw and pulling me forward toward him. My skin seems to burn where his bare fingers touch my face, and distantly I realize he’s never touched me. Not skin to skin.
Even the first day we met, he never proffered his hand. And until today, he’s never touched me until we were both decontaminated and gloved.
And now I know why.
As I stare into his intense eyes, feeling the blood pouring from my stomach, soaking into my shirt, I feel a memory rushing at me and pulling all at the same time, ripping my soul away in what I now recognize as one of the ways my mind handles remembering a single moment.
By dropping me directly into it.
THIRTY-NINE
I’m walking down the street. Germany, 1943. My body hurts. Each step unsteady and aching. It takes a while to realize that it’s because I’m old. I don’t remember ever being old before.
&
nbsp; It’s raining. Not the kind that really gets you wet, the kind that just makes you miserable. My arms are full of groceries, and they’re too heavy to spare a hand to swipe across my damp face.
Today I went east. Every day I walk as far as I can to a grocer—as many different ones as possible—and create new ration tickets to exchange for meager helpings of the barest necessities.
It’s stealing, I know—those ration tickets are my creation; they aren’t real. And since I still haven’t found my Quinn, they will disappear in about five minutes. But I think of myself as a rather sadder version of Robin Hood. Stealing from the poor to give to those who have nothing.
Someday I will be caught. But it will take a while yet, I think. No one suspects the little old lady, and I do my best to look even older and more frail than I actually am every time I go out.
Perhaps I can last until this war is over. My dear friends and me. The three families that have been with me for almost two years now, and the ones who come and go.
I’m almost home.
I pretend to fumble at the lock on the door, but actually I’m giving the special knock that will warn my friends that I am coming, that it is only me. I push the door closed and lean on it for a few seconds, breathing hard.
My frailty is less and less of a pretense these days. I stand straight and get two steps before something dark comes down over my head and I scream and drop the food.
I’m shuffled out the door and loaded into a vehicle. I say nothing. There’s a chance that I’ve been turned in to the SS, but my friends are safe. I will do nothing to endanger them if even the slightest possibility exists that they are yet alive. I hope and pray to anyone who may be out there that this is the case.
It feels like hours before the rumbling of the vehicle beneath me stops. My arms are seized again, and they march too fast for me. My feet drag, and I cannot move quickly enough to get them beneath me to walk on my own. Finally I’m shoved onto a hard surface—my hip bruising on the left side—and the dark material is yanked away from my face. I gasp at the fresh air, filling my lungs.
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